It’s been said that Mist of Pandaria is not alt friendly. Most of that involves the gearing aspect due to certain content walls like reputation, low Valor Point rewards and the large number of dailies. In the end, the issue ends up being time (or lack thereof) when it comes to playing each of your alts. So the big question is how do you deal with all your alts in a slow, grindy game?
The answer is fundamentally around time management. The game ultimately is all about good time management for many things. So the first thing to do is not become overwhelmed by the task of managing numerous toons. Realistically, you’ll probably only be able to handle 2-3 at a time max. Right now, I’m doing about 2-3 toons with a mixture of LFR, dailies and leveling. What you want to set up is a kind of rotation schedule. So rather than running each toon on every single task every day, you focus on groups at a time.
The best thing to do initially is focus on a single toon for a while until you can hit a leveling point. No, I’m not talking about level 90, but when you start maxing out the toon. For instance, maybe with regards to gear or dailies. Then you can start phasing that toon out as you move onto your other toons.
But again, with your first toon, you want to use that person as the seed planter. Just like in previous expansions, that first toon is essentially going to serve the other toons as “the hand that feeds.” In the case of Mist of Pandaria, the primary focus is on reputation gains and Valor Points. Valor Points might be slightly harder to obtain in terms of the cap and ability to gain the bonus to other toons. However, it’s the reputation bonus above all else which matters.
Also, focus on leveling a single toon at a time rather than running toons in parallel. For an alt-a-holic like myself, it can be tremendously tempting to start on each of your alts (especially when most are at level 85). But the general feeling of freshness is lost upon me since all I’m doing is repeating myself in a close range pattern. I like spacing out leveling to breathe more variety into the activities I do inside of WoW. That makes the process more mentally manageable.
The thing is that leveling will take time no matter what. Even in Cataclysm, it took me roughly a year to get most of my toons to 85 and geared. Certainly, there was more variety in the paths you could take to hit 85. However, in the end I used the same pattern over and over for most of them as I found it suitable for me. The trick though was avoiding burnout.
One major difference though was that the road to 85 vs the road to 90 was longer overall. So I didn’t take my own advice and concentrate on just one toon at a time, except for my paladin. That said, I did splinter them to a degree to make the process overall more manageable. Towards the end if I was able to max out on a toon, I would simply deprioritize them in favor of someone else that I wanted to bring up through the ranks.
Just remember that the real battle is about discipline and figuring out how much you can handle at once.